The Night Stages (9 page)

Back on the ground at St. Derwent, Teddy had shown himself to be a gifted mechanic: as if the planes were enlarged examples of the model vehicles he, in the past, had handled with such tenderness. He was sensitive and patient with them, and they, in turn, appeared to respond to his attentions in an almost human way, their engines bursting into life, their fuselages shining in the sun.

He had been a true innocent, Tam remembers telling Niall, utterly incapable of duplicity. If he thought there was a problem – mechanical, social, or personal – he would do his best to identify it and then make an honest attempt to solve it. It was almost, she mused, as if the machines knew this. And people too. They liked him and trusted him, but nobody got stuck on him. Teddy was needed to accomplish certain tasks, and he was comforting to have about, but he did not have the knack of being emotionally essential. “Poor Teddy,” she added.

“But you miss him,” Niall said.

“Oh, yes,” she said, turning her face from his as if ashamed. “Poor Teddy. I miss him.”

D
uring the first year after his mother’s death in the autumn of 1943, things had come to an impasse regarding Kieran. He had spent the previous six months avoiding school and collapsing into rages whenever anyone suggested he do anything at all. Now he no longer needed to run away from the school, as the Brothers flatly refused to take him and his tantrums back under any circumstances, including the circumstances threatened by the truant officer if one of their charges remained on the loose. Father O’Sullivan visited the house frequently and attempted to talk to the boy but found he could interest him in nothing at all beyond tales of Jaweh at his most vengeful and bloodthirsty. Any attempt at the Rosary was met with either a complete withdrawal or a tantrum, and finally the fear of the latter resulted in the priest removing himself entirely from the huge project that the boy had become.

Almost everyone in the town had a theory as to how Kieran might be trained, and few were shy about offering their
advice. Shouting, strapping, confining, singing, set-dancing, Bible memorization, manual labour, and even the questionable idea of a chemistry set were suggested to his father as possible cures for his behaviour. Kieran was talked about in shops, pubs, market stalls, caravans, cottages and byres, and at the weather station, where the men spoke to his father about him metaphorically in terms of various kinds of – mostly bad – weather. Niall, who on calm days was fond of his younger brother, had taken to giving him a wide berth on weekends when he was home from the Dublin University. The knowledge of the younger boy’s volatility, and the attention that was drawn to him as a result, seemed to him unbalanced and unfair. More than once he said, you’re too old now, Kieran, for the temper. It looks very bad on you.

Kieran began to suffer from migraines. His gentle father could minister to him with damp cloths and soft words when he had the headaches, but the tantrums put the man’s wits astray. He was heartsick for the boy and blamed himself as he hadn’t the inner fortitude to whip him, though he doubted, and likely correctly, that a beating of any kind would produce the desired results, and believed that it might in fact make things worse. With the shame and grief of his wife’s death all around him, he could not commit an action for which there was no guarantee of a positive outcome. Often that meant no action at all.

And so the father of the boys became prematurely old and absent. Even Niall’s repetitive triumphs on the sports fields and in the classroom could not shine through the
vague, sad mist that surrounded him. Niall would later tell Tam that there were times when he felt he had simply slipped his father’s mind. But, truly, there had been a kind of elderliness about the father’s character as far back as anyone could remember, an adherence to schedules and habit, and a love of simple comfort. He grew roses and fed birds and took the same walk each evening, past the courthouse, then up the hill to the High Street, then down Market Lane and along by the shops and pubs of Main Street until he was back at his own gate. He now took longer walks each evening, his head down and his hands clasped behind his back, contemplative, strolling with apparent calmness through the capricious variations of weather he had forecasted at the end of the previous day. And then he stepped back inside, and under a roof he kept in perfect repair against the storms he himself had predicted, he prepared to endure his son’s chaotic, unpredictable anger.

Coming and going from the house more often now that there was no woman in it, Gerry-Annie watched the child’s behaviour with a look of disapproval but said nothing. She had no children of her own but had come from a family of eleven. Her siblings had been far from subdued but in her world no child could ever have stood centre stage for more than a moment unless they were sick and dying, and even then the attention from adults was, by necessity, brief. In between these emergencies, any behaviour of this nature would have been
ameliorated by the fists of older brothers, and nobody would have thought any more about it.

One day, while Annie was mopping the tiles that covered the floor of the long entrance foyer, Kieran rounded the corner at the far end with a full tray of Waterford crystal in his hands, his mouth open in a howl of rage. He came to a stop when he saw her, then flung his burden in her direction. Not one shard of glass came within five feet of her person, but Annie had a temper of her own. In seconds she had the boy’s collar in one fist and his hair in the other and was holding him at arm’s-length several inches from the floor. He kicked like an angry donkey, but although he was now almost twelve, he was still small enough that she was considerably larger than him and he was unable to extricate himself from her grip or make contact with the arms he was wheeling in her direction. But it wasn’t until he began to swear energetically that Annie took extreme measures. “You’ve the mouth of a Black and Tan on you,” she announced just before she forced his head into the pail full of brown and soapy water. When that head emerged still cursing, she plunged it in again. And when his head came back up with soapy bubbles ballooning out of his nose she threw her own head back and laughed a loud and protracted laugh, and as she did, the boy produced a tentative smile in return. “Go get a cloth,” she said, prodding him with the handle of the mop. “You’ll be picking up every piece of that glass, and you’ll be doing that carefully. If there is one speck of it left, or if you cut yourself, that head of yours
goes right back in this water.” The broom handle was exploring Kieran’s ear. He stuck out his tongue. Annie lifted the mop to cuff him, but he had vanished before she could even take serious aim.

He fetched some rags and he carefully picked up the glass. He rolled up the collected shards in a cloth and took the bundle to the bin. And more than once he smiled radiantly, and not a little insolently, at Gerry-Annie, who was standing like a sentinel in the hall. She ignored his cheekiness. It was only cheekiness, after all.

When she returned to the house the following Friday, he was down the stairs to meet her in an instant. Throughout the morning as she involved herself in a number of tasks he trailed around behind her picking up various objects and putting them in places they didn’t belong so that she would be required to speak to him. It turned out that he liked the sound of her voice, which was firm without being high or sharp; there was not a trace of hysteria in it no matter what he did. “That’s enough of that,” she would say, often without even turning around, or “Put that back this instant.”

He was also pleased and impressed by the ways she described his own face to him. “You’ve the devil in you as vigorous as a viper,” she would say, or, “You’re as anxious for trouble as a ram in full rut.” Eventually she set him to polishing silver, which he did with uncommon enthusiasm, blackening his clothes in the process and bringing a wealth of further insults down on his head. She filled the laundry tub with water, handed him a cake of lye, and made him scrub his
own shirt. He liked the washboard, he liked the lye, he liked the way his hands felt in the warm water. Later in the day, when the shirt had gone from wet to damp, she heated an iron on the stove and showed him how to press the wrinkles out of the cotton. Then she told him he would be finishing the job by himself, and she would be calling the guards if there was one scorch mark on the garment. She made him dust the sideboard in the dining room, every picture in the house, and the stairs and banister. All this was very satisfying to him; he would do anything she said.

His father noticed the change in him. But even when a full week had gone by without a tantrum, he was still apprehensive. When three weeks passed without an incident, he nervously asked Niall, who was home from college for the weekend, what he thought accounted for the serenity in the house. Niall announced, with a smirking irony, that his brother had fallen in love with Gerry-Annie. Their father laughed for the first time in a year but had to admit that Annie had Kieran doing housework and he seemed to have taken to it.

The tantrums, however, returned in full force when Annie was unable to come to the house for two weeks because of a bad bout of bronchitis. At one point it was necessary for his father to put Kieran in the coal cellar, this being the only part of the house with a door that locked. The boy ran back and forth in that dark prison, beating his hands until they bled on the limestone walls and hurling handfuls of coal at the planks of the closed door. He was unaware at such times of anything beyond the swollen beast of the tantrum pushing a
path through him, the way that overburdened lorries or flocks of animals pushed their way down the long, narrow street of the town. When his father eventually unlocked the door, Kieran ran down the hall, blackening the wallpaper with a soiled sleeve. Then he pounded up the stairs into his room where he flung himself onto the bed without removing his clothes. When she returned the following morning, Gerry-Annie would see that the sheets had been darkened by him. She would be furious and would describe his face to him once again. He thought of this just before he fell into a deep sleep.

It was Annie who made the decision. She approached the boys’ father in the courteous manner that was natural to a country woman, but without a hint of deference to the fact that she was employed by him. “I’ll be taking himself home with me,” she said. “It’s for the best.” “What about school?” the father asked, though it was a rhetorical question, both of them knowing that school was lost to Kieran. “I’ll get him to work around the place,” Annie said. “He’ll be happy enough with that.”

The boy, listening at the top of the stairs, turned and walked into his room, where he packed a few belongings in his schoolbag. All that year he had carried in his mind the dimly remembered landscape near Culloo Rock, how the priest had said it was the final end of everything, the end of the known world. He recalled the other boys’ hands at the verge of the well and his own hands not among them. There
would always be an air of transgression somewhere near him. He could bring to mind the way the land tilted upwards toward the cliffs, and at times he could picture his mother and the chemist, two dark figures, quietly making the uphill walk toward the edge, the decision taken and all tension drained from them. Even though he was a child, he knew that the tragedy they shared would not feel as lonely as his busy, muscular tantrums.

He stood for a moment at the door of his room. The stairs, the entrance hall they led to, the forward thrust of the garden walk he could see through the glass in the door, and then, across the way, Bridge Street moving down toward the harbour – all this combined to make one steep, continuous path. He felt light-headed, as if he might stumble and fall helplessly out of his childhood and into something that was not quite adulthood, something not fully human. Then he saw Gerry-Annie removing her apron and putting on her coat with the lambswool collar in the calm, ordinary way that she always had at the end of the day, and he knew he was safe from the tug of dark gravity.

That evening, before he left the house with Annie, he shook his father’s hand without speaking as if he had already become a stranger to him. He could hear his mother whispering something in his mind and he was trying not to listen. His father touched his shoulder at the door. “It’s only for a while,” he said, “and you’ll come back to me on Sundays.”
Sundays
, his mother whispered from somewhere halfway up the stairs.

Kieran said nothing, but as he closed the door behind him, he could feel the tantrums separating themselves from him, as though they were insisting on remaining behind in the dim corners of the house, or as if they had tumbled down the bridge road and into the inky water that lapped at the quay.